Chapter 3 · Verse 24·Spoken by Krishna
उत्सीदेयुरिमे लोका न कुर्यां कर्म चेदहम्। सङ्करस्य च कर्ता स्यामुपहन्यामिमाः प्रजाः
utsīdeyur ime lokā na kuryāṁ karma ched aham sankarasya cha kartā syām upahanyām imāḥ prajāḥ
These worlds would fall to ruin if I did not act. I would be the cause of confusion, and I would destroy these people.
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Sanskrit recitation by Swami Brahmānanda
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Convergence
rishna is giving the reason behind what he just said: if he stopped working, the worlds themselves would collapse. The word the commentators dwell on is 'utsideyuh,' which they gloss as sinking down, falling away, perishing, or being ruined. The logic is plain. Action is the cause that holds the world standing. Remove the cause and the effect cannot last. So if even the Lord were to withdraw from action, the very framework that keeps the worlds in order would lose its support and give way.
Braided from 13 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The collapse is not abstract: it runs through ordinary people who take their cue from the one at the top. Krishna is the foremost, and people follow the foremost. If he ceased to act, those who follow him would also drop their own duties. Several commentators name what would then break down: the order of the four classes and four stages of life (varnashrama dharma, the code that assigns each person their proper work and place). With that structure gone, 'sankara,' the confusion or intermixing of the classes, would follow, because nobody would keep to their appointed role. So Krishna's first concern is not himself but the example his conduct sets for everyone below him.
Braided from 11 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar · Swami Sivananda · Swami Ramsukhdas
The chain ends in a stark admission. Krishna says he himself would then be the maker of that confusion ('karta syam') and the destroyer of these creatures ('upahanyam imah prajah'). The commentators feel the sharp irony here: the Lord exists to favour and protect his creatures, so for him to be the very one who undoes them would be utterly unfitting. Some read 'upahanyam' as outright destroying, others as defiling, smearing, or making impure through the fault of confusion. Either way, the point stands. By a single act of withdrawal the protector would turn into the ruiner, and that contradiction is exactly why he keeps working.
Braided from 14 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Dhanapati Sūri · Rāmānujācārya · Vallabhācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrī Bhāskara · Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
The deeper lesson several commentators draw is that knowledge does not exempt one from action. Even the person of fulfilled understanding, the knower of the Self who has nothing left to gain for himself, still has the favouring of others to do. Krishna, who needs nothing, acts anyway, purely for the world's sake. That is the model. The conclusion drawn is that action must not be abandoned out of the conceit of being a knower; so long as one moves and acts in the world, the work is to be done, unattached and for the welfare of all.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Śrī Bhāskara · Lokmanya Tilak
Divergence
Advaita Vedānta
These commentators read the verse as Krishna's worked example for the knower of the Self. The Self-knower, who rightly knows the Self and is free of the conceit of being a doer, has reached the accomplished state and has no task of his own left to perform. Yet even he must act, for the favouring of others. This accomplished freedom belongs to any man of knowledge, not to Arjuna alone. Some of them add a second reading of the surrounding teaching: it is not only world-maintenance that obliges you to act, but the very principle that a follower must do whatever the foremost does, not act by his own choice. Whatever Krishna's own conduct is, just that the follower must reproduce, and the next verses show what that conduct is.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Śrī Nīlakaṇṭha · Dhanapati Sūri
Viśiṣṭādvaita
These commentators narrow 'loka' to the 'shista-loka,' the exemplary or conduct-following people whose settling of what is lawful depends on the conduct of the worthy. They then apply the example pointedly to Arjuna. If Arjuna, who is exemplary, were to take up the standing in knowledge (jnana-yoga), then those of incomplete knowledge who imitate him, seekers of liberation who do not know their own qualification and are not actually fit for that standing, would take it up too and perish. They would fall both ways, losing the true goal and gaining the false. So the learned man who is to be held up as exemplary must himself do action; 'utsada' here is precisely the loss of the true human aim and the acquiring of its opposite.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika
Śuddhādvaita
This commentator gives the collapse a bhakti-centered, almost cosmic reading. The deep sense is that if everyone turned wholly to devotion and the direct sight of the Lord, that is, to liberation, then these worlds, beginning with Manu and the rest, would have no further creation and would be destroyed. By the Lord's command Brahma and others create the offspring; were the Lord to be unfavourable and undo them, he himself would be the maker of confusion and the burden of the offspring. He also notes that creatures who act against the Lord's will, not knowing the form of devotion, would themselves cause confusion and even the failure of devotion's fruit. The Lord protects the established order ('maryada') precisely by acting within it himself.
Śrī Puruṣottama
Dvaita
Jayatirtha did not comment on this verse, so the Dvaita tradition offers no separate reading here.
Śrī Jayatīrtha
Bhakti
These commentators read the verse through Krishna as the example everyone watches. People take him as their model; if he stopped doing his duty, they would stop and fall away, and from that the confusion of the social orders would arise, of which he alone would be the author. Baladeva sharpens this with scripture, calling Krishna the very 'bridge' or holder-apart of the worlds who keeps their bounds from breaking; for that holder himself to break the bounds would be a contradiction. He and another of these commentators then add a warning drawn from the Bhagavata: whatever free or unusual conduct the Lord shows, done for his devotees' happiness, is not for lesser beings to imitate unless he has also commanded it in words. One should practice the lords' word, and only such of their conduct as accords with their word; one who is not a lord is destroyed by imitating it out of folly, as Rudra was not harmed by the ocean's poison.
Śrīdhara Svāmī · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Śrīla Baladeva · Sant Jñāneśvar
Bhedabheda
This commentator draws the verse into a general rule about who is entitled to action. Because even the Lord, while dwelling in a human body, is subject to the duties of righteousness, the renunciation of action does not hold for embodied beings. So long as the cognition of difference persists, there is entitlement to action, whether for one's own sake or for others'. Only when one has left the human body and become a god or the Supreme Self does entitlement cease. Action must not be abandoned out of the conceit of being a knower; rather, as the ignorant act with attachment, so the wise should act without attachment, desiring the welfare of the world.
Śrī Bhāskara
Modern
These commentators take the verse as Krishna's plain demonstration that universal welfare ('lokasamgraha') is no mere slogan. Tilak stresses that the example bears out his reading of the earlier verses: even the knower, who has no duty left for his own sake, must still perform all action desirelessly. He marks the key difference between two paths: the Samkhya knower cares nothing for what becomes of the world and drops all action, while the Karma-Yoga knower keeps acting for universal welfare as a matter of the utmost importance. Ramsukhdas notes the method: in an earlier verse Krishna stated the necessity of doing one's duty positively, and here he states it negatively, by showing the harm that would follow from not doing it. Even where the Lord has no need, the doing of action is itself for the world's holding-together.
Swami Sivananda · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
A Seeker Asks
If Krishna is the all-powerful Lord who needs nothing, why would his pausing actually cause the world to collapse, and is this a real dependency or just an argument aimed at Arjuna?
The commentators do not present this as Krishna being personally exhausted or strained into holding the world up. The mechanism they describe runs through example and imitation. Krishna is the foremost, and people pattern their lives on the foremost; if he dropped his duty, those who follow him would drop theirs, and the whole ordered structure of work and role would unravue into confusion. So the dependency is real, but it is moral and social, not a matter of the Lord lacking strength.
Braided from 6 commentators
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Ānandagiri · Madhusūdana Sarasvatī · Rāmānujācārya · Śrīla Viśvanātha · Swami Ramsukhdas
It is also a genuine argument addressed to Arjuna, and the commentators say so openly. Krishna is using himself as a worked illustration: just as my withdrawal would ruin the world by example, so your withdrawal into mere knowledge would mislead those who imitate you, who are not actually fit for that path, and they would fall. The example and the lesson are one. By showing what he himself does, Krishna shows Arjuna what he too must do.
Rāmānujācārya · Vedānta Deśika · Lokmanya Tilak · Swami Ramsukhdas
Finally, the point is not that the Lord is trapped by the world but that he freely chooses to uphold its order from within. Having nothing to gain, he acts anyway, purely for the favouring of his creatures; he is the one who holds the bounds of the world apart, and he keeps them by acting inside them rather than standing aloof. So the verse is less about a limit on his power than about the shape of his love: he protects by participating.
Śaṅkarācārya · Śrī Puruṣottama · Śrīla Baladeva · Śrī Bhāskara
Contemplation
Take Krishna's self-portrait personally. He owns nothing he still needs to gain, and yet he keeps working, steadily and without slackening, purely for the good of the whole. That is the standard offered to you. The temptation, once you taste a little understanding, is to think your duties are now beneath you and to drift away from action. Tilak draws the line clearly: the knower who follows the path of action does not ask what becomes of the world; he keeps doing all his work, according to his own role, desirelessly, treating the welfare of others as a matter of real importance even when he gains nothing from it. So do your work, fully, but loosen your grip on its fruits. Let the doing be your offering to the world's holding-together, not a means to your own reward.
Sit with this · Lokmanya Tilak
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